Language, Meaning and Subjectivity

This chapter presents the 19th century scholar of signs and language Victoria Lady Welby, a contemporary of Charles S. Peirce with whom she exchanged ideas, regularly corresponding with him during the last decade of their lives. Welby introduced the term “significs” for her special approach to signs and meaning to underline the connection in live communication with sense and value. Her work has come to the fore in recent times with reeditions of her published writings, collections of her unpublished writings and writings by others dedicated to her. On the background of this re-discovery is the transition in sign and communication studies from so-called “decodification semiotics” to “interpretation semiotics” with respect to which Welby’s work is a contribution and indicator of where sign studies lead today. In fact, given her focus on the relation between signs and values, on the interpretive-translational dimension of sign activity and signifying processes and together on their pragmatical-ethical implications, “significs” anticipates the current tendency now emerging ever more strongly to focus on the problem of the values that guide human behaviour and the signs in which they are constituted, whether verbal or nonverbal. From this point of view “significs” can be considered as a prefiguration of “semioethics”.